281–290 of 496 posts
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How can I do better?
Quality over quantity
My blog is a combination of different content types. "Entries" are the ones I spend the most time on - https://simonwillison.net/entries/
Links and notes are more short form - I try to keep the quality high (especially with regards to accuracy) but they're also much higher volume than entries: https://simonwillison.net/blogmarks/ and https://simonwillison.net/notes/
LLMs are not smart as the LLM vendors claimed to be. If they are, we wouldn't be having this conversation because they will be fully autonomous People who blindly submits LLM generated code or do not cite its usage really need to stop doing it
In the past, OSS projects were self-selective because you needed to be able to make working code, and if you did, you probably also reasonably did the right things as you spent years learning this, and have some sort of reasoning behind your feature, need, etc.
Today, even if the LLM was perfect and could reason well, it still does the bidding of the prompter - and you no longer have self-selection. Heck, it'll be difficult for zig devs to decide what's actually made by an LLM or a human anyway, I'm sure there's already LLM generated code in there - but at least these [human submiters] still need to be reasonably good at code.
I wonder if we'll end up with "only human with trusted badge of honor" can commit, and/or "LLMs now reason well enough to tell you: 'no, f off, this feature, plan, idea is garbage I'm not generating it" hehe.
I don't have an opinion about Zig AI policy for contributions. Their project, their policies. Fine for me. However, I wanted to give Zig a try in an agentic coding scenario. For tasks that would take a few seconds when choosing Python, Java, or JavaScript as a target language, it would take tens of minutes and waste millions of tokens before producing anything. Almost any model gets stuck trying to figure out the cor…
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As if that was a bad thing in 2026!
...why does it being 2026 make nondeterminism more desirable or reasonable?
That said, it still feels like they are unnecessarily hobbling their project. LLMs are tools and they can help you think, research, and code. You can overuse them, yes, but you should embrace them where they help.
not accepting bun's PR for other reasons is totally fine (sounds like it's a core change where more thinking needs to be done), but simply banning all LLM authored PRs is unnecessarily restrictive. Just focus on the quality of the work.
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I don't think it's the complete fanbase. However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing. It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live. But they have a very loose relationship with truth and reason. Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it. LLM's have changed that and it's a huge problem. It's hard to kn…
> It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry. True, regardless of that, for sure with LLM we are borrowing Technical debt like never before.
I think it's the least hostile thing they can say, and I respect their decision for their own project. That said, it still feels like they are unnecessarily hobbling their project. LLMs are tools and they can help you think, research, and code. You can overuse them, yes, but you should embrace them where they help. not accepting bun's PR for other reasons is totally fine (sounds like it's a core change where more thi…
Maintainers should get to spend their time developing stuff, not just reviewing low effort PRs. The flood of LLM code is changing the balance for the worse for maintainers, and I can totally see why they’d just want to ban it.
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I've had this issue too, and I feel it was an important lesson—kind of like the first time getting a hangover. On the other hand, LLM-generated code comments better than I do, so given a long enough time horizon, it could be more understandable at a later time than code I've written myself (we've all had the experience of forgetting how things work).
It's not. Invariably, the code is locally fine and globally nonsense.
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This mindset is fine (it's mine essentially too). But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
I generally do have that mindset, but over the past 1y of Claude code I do notice that I’m clearly losing my understanding of the internals of projects. I do review LLM generated code, understand it, no problem reading/following through. But then someone asks me a question, and I’m like… wait, I actually don’t know. I remember the instructions I gave and reviewing the code but don’t actually have a fine-details model…
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Also my experience. Though my actual ability to remember the language nuances and stdlib is suffering from this :(
can't you ask llms to consider those nuances while writing the code or refresh your memory?